Data Monday: Social, Social, Social

Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December. (source)

Consumers spent more than 5.5 hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year. (source)

47% of online adults use social networking sites, up from 37% in November 2008. (source)

73% of wired American teens now use social networking websites, a significant increase from previous surveys. Just over half of online teens (55%) used social networking sites in November 2006 and 65% did so in February 2008. (source)

Facebook is currently the most commonly used online social network among adults. Among adult profile owners, 73% have a profile on Facebook, 48% have a profile on MySpace and 14% have a LinkedIn profile. (source)

Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. (source)

Twitter is processing more than one billion tweets per month. January passed 1.2 billion, averaging almost 40 million tweets per day. (source)

The activity on Twitter has doubled since August 2009. January 2010 had 16 times as many tweets as January 2009. (source)

Twitter users were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, Twitter is seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (source)

64% of Twitter’s users are aged 35 or older. The average Twitter user is 39 years old. (source)

Facebook now has more than 400 million active users. 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day. (source)

More than 100 million people actively using Facebook from their mobile devices every month. This comes less than six months after Facebook announced 65 million people on Facebook Mobile. (source)

Facebook says more than 3 billion photos are being uploaded every month, up from 2.5 billion in December, 2 billion in September and 1 billion in July. (source)

Facebook reported 1 billion items (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc) shared a week in July 2009, 2 billion shared a week in September, then a big jump to 3.5 billion in December, and another big jump to 5 billion a week as of February 2010. (source)

Facebook users are also posting 60 million status updates a day or 50 percent more than they were in September. However, the overall percentage of Facebook’s user base posting status updates has actually fallen with 35 of the 400 million users publishing these per day. (source)

61% of Facebooks’s users are aged 35 or older. The average Facebook user is 38 years old. (source)

There are more than 3 million active Pages on Facebook, nearly double the 1.6 million it reported in December. Pages that Facebook defines as local businesses went from 700,000 actives to 1.5 million. In other words, local businesses comprised half of the overall increase in active Pages over the last couple of months. (source)

13% of US traffic to big web portals — Yahoo, MSN, AOL — came from Facebook in December 2009. (source)